vsphere-csi.md

vSphere CSI Driver

vSphere CSI driver allows you to provision volumes over a vSphere deployment. The Kubernetes historic in-tree cloud provider is deprecated and will be removed in future versions.

Prerequisites

The vSphere user for CSI driver requires a set of privileges to perform Cloud Native Storage operations. Follow the official guide to configure those.

Kubespray configuration

To enable vSphere CSI driver, uncomment the vsphere_csi_enabled option in group_vars/all/vsphere.yml and set it to true.

To set the number of replicas for the vSphere CSI controller, you can change vsphere_csi_controller_replicas option in group_vars/all/vsphere.yml.

You need to source the vSphere credentials you use to deploy your machines that will host Kubernetes.

Variable	Required	Type	Choices	Default	Comment
external_vsphere_vcenter_ip	TRUE	string			IP/URL of the vCenter
external_vsphere_vcenter_port	TRUE	string		"443"	Port of the vCenter API
external_vsphere_insecure	TRUE	string	"true", "false"	"true"	set to "true" if the host above uses a self-signed cert
external_vsphere_user	TRUE	string			User name for vCenter with required privileges (Can also be specified with the VSPHERE_USER environment variable)
external_vsphere_password	TRUE	string			Password for vCenter (Can also be specified with the VSPHERE_PASSWORD environment variable)
external_vsphere_datacenter	TRUE	string			Datacenter name to use
external_vsphere_kubernetes_cluster_id	TRUE	string		"kubernetes-cluster-id"	Kubernetes cluster ID to use
external_vsphere_version	TRUE	string		"7.0u1"	Vmware Vsphere version where located all VMs
external_vsphere_cloud_controller_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v1.31.0"	CPI manager image tag to use
vsphere_syncer_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v3.3.1"	Syncer image tag to use
vsphere_csi_attacher_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v4.3.0"	CSI attacher image tag to use
vsphere_csi_controller	TRUE	string		"v3.3.1"	CSI controller image tag to use
vsphere_csi_controller_replicas	TRUE	integer		1	Number of pods Kubernetes should deploy for the CSI controller
vsphere_csi_liveness_probe_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v2.10.0"	CSI liveness probe image tag to use
vsphere_csi_provisioner_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v2.1.0"	CSI provisioner image tag to use
vsphere_csi_node_driver_registrar_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v3.5.0"	CSI node driver registrar image tag to use
vsphere_csi_driver_image_tag	TRUE	string		"v3.3.1"	CSI driver image tag to use
vsphere_csi_resizer_tag	TRUE	string		"v1.8.0"	CSI resizer image tag to use
vsphere_csi_aggressive_node_drain	FALSE	boolean		false	Enable aggressive node drain strategy
vsphere_csi_aggressive_node_unreachable_timeout	FALSE	int		300	Timeout till node will be drained when it in an unreachable state
vsphere_csi_aggressive_node_not_ready_timeout	FALSE	int		300	Timeout till node will be drained when it in not-ready state
vsphere_csi_namespace	TRUE	string		"kube-system"	vSphere CSI namespace to use; kube-system for backward compatibility, should be change to vmware-system-csi on the long run

Usage example

To test the dynamic provisioning using vSphere CSI driver, make sure to create a storage policy and storage class, then apply the following manifest:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: csi-pvc-vsphere
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
  storageClassName: mongodb-sc

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - image: nginx
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    name: nginx
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80
      protocol: TCP
    volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /usr/share/nginx/html
        name: csi-data-vsphere
  volumes:
  - name: csi-data-vsphere
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: csi-pvc-vsphere
      readOnly: false

Apply this conf to your cluster: kubectl apply -f nginx.yml

You should see the PVC provisioned and bound:

$ kubectl get pvc
NAME              STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
csi-pvc-vsphere   Bound    pvc-dc7b1d21-ee41-45e1-98d9-e877cc1533ac   1Gi        RWO            mongodb-sc     10s

And the volume mounted to the Nginx Pod (wait until the Pod is Running):

kubectl exec -it nginx -- df -h | grep /usr/share/nginx/html
/dev/sdb         976M  2.6M  907M   1% /usr/share/nginx/html

More info

For further information about the vSphere CSI Driver, you can refer to the official vSphere Cloud Provider documentation.